Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (Warner) is the energized sequel to Guy Ritchie’s reincarnation of the world’s greatest detective as a smart-aleck action movie hero played with cheeky playfulness by Robert Downey Jr.

There’s a strange leveling that home video provides by putting Guy Ritchie’s big-budget, action-crammed, ADD-plagued Sherlock Holmes features next to the updated BBC TV “Sherlock” features, produced with smaller budgets and smarter scripts (reviewed on Videodrone here). They couldn’t be more different, and yet they offer two different approaches to the literary detective who seems to get a definitive revival every generation or so. For fans of the original fiction, the Benedict Cumberbatch Holmes offers an intelligent update of Doyle’s stories. And for the Hollywood culture of bigger, faster, more, there is this revision with Holmes as a rather whimsical prankster.

In this very busy story, Holmes and his brother Mycroft (Stephen Fry) hijack the honeymoon of Watson (Jude Law) and his bride (Kelly Reilly) to save them from Professor Moriarty (Jared Harris), and then head to the continent with a gypsy fortune teller (Noomi Rapace) targeted by Moriarty’s assassins to take on the master criminal’s latest diabolical scheme. Action ramping, silly costumes, and general mayhem ensues.

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The highly acclaimed and sparsely seen trilogy of films made by Pedro Costa in the impoverished Fontainhas neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon debuts on DVD in Letters From Fontainhas: Three Films By Pedro Costa (Criterion), a generous box set from Criterion featuring Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006). Costa is an acquired taste and while I respect the artist and his vision, I’m not enthralled by his films. That’s no reason for anyone else to avoid these films, however, which have been embraced and celebrated by critics around the world. I review the set for MSN here, but you should really check out these pieces by Sam Adams (in the Los Angeles Times) and Dave Kehr (in the New York Times) to get a more in-depth and appreciative overview of his films.

Hard-learned lessons in "An Education"

The education of An Education (Sony), based on the memoir by Lynn Barber, comes to a smart and mature sixteen-year-old girl who, eager to escape her petite bourgeois life in early 1960s London, is swept off her feet by a confident, charming and worldly man with a lot of secrets. Carey Mulligan earned an Oscar nomination for her performance as a sophisticated girl intoxicated by the affair and Peter Sarsgaard is so deft that he staves off the creepy reality of a grown man seducing a high-school girl—until the reality of the situation becomes clear of everyone, including the complicit parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour). Beautifully directed and acted from a memoir deftly adapted to the screen by Nick Hornby. Features relaxed commentary by director Lone Scherfig and actors Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard (who spend as much time reminiscing over the shoot and appreciating key moments as discussing the production and the characters), a nine-minute making of featurette (which also includes interviews with screenwriter Nick Hornby and author Lynn Barber) and 11 deleted scenes among the supplements on both DVD and Blu-ray.

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Rocknrolla (dir: Guy Ritchie)

There is something a little pretentious about the possessive directorial credit: “A Joe Blow Film,” but in many cases it is deserved and some it’s more descriptive than a plot synopsis. Rocknrolla is a Guy Ritchie film, in every slang-filled Britgangster-talk line, every plot twist yanking the story threads into a single strand (in Ritchie’s case, it’s like a plot twist-tie), every flash of criminal code and junkie honor in the violent worlds of his street-level characters, and every corruption of honor (even the tarnished honor of his street thugs) by the blokes above it all, yanking the strings until the string yank back.

"RocknRolla" - Gerard Butler and Idris Elba

RocknRolla isn’t ambitious. It’s flashy, it’s garish, it’s self-aware and self-satisfied, it’s front loaded with exposition that flashes through character introductions and a survey of the very complicated relationships in the British underworld and it’s so packed with oh-so-clever bits that it’s entertaining even when you don’t know what’s going on. When you do know what’s going on, it’s not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. But it is kind fun, in a junk-food crime fantasy sort of way.

Gerard Butler is the ostensible lead as One Two, a freelance street thug and member of the loose brotherhood “The Wild Bunch” but in the scheme of things he’s just one part of an ensemble lorded over by crime boss Tom Wilkinson and explained by narrator Mark Strong, who plays his right-hand man Archy. There’s also a Russian mob muscling in, crooked politicians taking pay-offs, music impresarios, a wild-card drug addict on a mission of vengeance, lots of freelance muscle and a gorgeous bookkeeper (Thandie Newton) playing her own scams with the help of part-time lover and partner-in-crime One Two.

Rocknrolla is good at what it does, which is play out a violent criminal fairy tale in a movie gangster fantasy, where the good guys are just bad guys who look good only by contrast to the really bad guys, and where we root for the thugs who prey upon other thugs. In Ritchie’s world, there aren’t too many innocent folk, and most of them are duly scared off before they get hurt. Everyone else is fair game.

It’s an exceedingly cleverly pieced together puzzle of a movie with criss-crossing storylines that depend on a tremendous amount of dramatically apropos coincidence that tangle up into a narratively satisfying (if hardly surprising) neat little knot of poetic justice. You may not always guess right, but then it’s not the kind of film that makes you care about it until it happens. For all his attempts at suspense, it’s really about the minor pleasures of watching him play with film and style and storytelling. The crime movie genre isn’t a canvas, it’s a toybox and he’s merely finding new ways to play with old toys.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno (dir: Kevin Smith)

Kevin Smith once again trolls the depths of filthy language and bodily functions to find romance in the story of two lifelong friends who discover their true feelings when they team up to make a pornographic film.
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